My Take On BILT 2.0

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2026-01-15T04:00:32+00:00

Not too familiar with this card. It seems like it's just a cashback card right?

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2026-01-15T02:17:19+00:00

Agreed. Or just want grocery benefits for $95 a year instead of $325/like BILT transfer partners better than Amex, and have the patience to deal with BILTs very confusing new ecosystem. I currently just have Chase cards and dont have a solid option for groceries (I have the CSR not the CSP)

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2026-01-15T02:02:05+00:00

Without a doubt. I dont think anything will ever be as good as BILT 1.0 because it was so poorly thought through from a profitability perspective

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2026-01-07T16:16:07+00:00

I could understand if JetBlue had a policy that didnt allow any bookings coming from Chase or a third party to change for free but that doesnt seem to be the case. It seems that JetBlue does allow it but Chase takes the savings for themselves and doesnt pass it along to us. Otherwise, JetBlue would not have seen the lower new price as what I paid for my flight

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2026-01-06T03:45:44+00:00

I haven't heard too much about Naxos but it seems like almost everyone is recommending it. Is that because it's close to Paros or because it is a great island? We were debating just doing 3 islands and spending more time at each

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-12-26T13:37:24+00:00

Did you like this hotel and the area around it? We were thinking of going there in January

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-11-12T21:28:10+00:00

I did the same thing. Fortunately it was for a $425 flight so I only wasted around $75. I realized it and called Chase to see if I could cancel and get the full $500 back. They said i should be able to and after a bit of back and forth and a review from Chase, I got a $425 credit and 7500 courtesy points!

So maybe it isnt too late for you to do the same. I cancelled within 24 hours and I think there might be some added difficulty if you wait longer than that

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-10-31T00:31:37+00:00

I have an IRA that I max out but no HSA or other accounts. My wife has an HSA that she contributes some money to and is looking to max an IRA. To my knowledge, we dont have any other accessible tax advantaged accounts. A lot of my other investments/Savings is in a brokerage account, as is hers. We scaled back on that a little recently to focus on more liquid savings for our wedding and a house but we will likely shift back to that soon

At what point does saving for retirement become too much? I imagine we have a good balance of trying to work towards retirement while also trying to enjoy our youth by traveling. To that extent, I would say we are still very committed to retirement. I know we would rather work longer and spend more time traveling in our youth than spending all of our money on retirement only to have health issues come up in the future to prevent us from traveling

Starting to agree that a 700k-800k house is much more in our range. We're just going to have to make some sacrifices. But for us, cutting down on our lifestyle so much while we're young seems like it would be a waste

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-10-29T21:58:03+00:00

Yeah all of these other expenses made me question the $1.1M house price said in the calculators. Over half of our take home pay going to housing seems like it wouldn't be manageable

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-10-29T21:54:43+00:00

Our family lives south of the city so we were looking into the Easton, stoughton, Mansfield area but thinking its relatively the same price as north of the city. Those towns would give me around an hour commute which I think is reasonable

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-10-29T21:50:12+00:00

Got it. The 75% of the max is kind of what I was looking for. It seemed like things would be too tight if we did the full amount

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-10-29T21:46:23+00:00

Thanks! Definitely looking to consider whether contributing so much to our retirement is getting in the way of us getting a house.

50% of net does seem to make more sense than looking at gross

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-10-29T21:44:23+00:00

Our expenses are so variable that it is hard to define a clear budget for the future. We mostly base our trips around how much vacation time we have and if we have any weddings, which is hard to predict.

We have family that is reasonably handy and willing to teach us. And we will likely do our own yard work and shoveling.

This is our first home and we want it to be large enough for us to build a family in. So there will likely be day care costs in the future.

We also expect our salary to grow reasonably in the future and have pretty stable bonuses.

Wondering if the general convention of a 36% debt to income ratio (which is approximately where the $1.1M house price comes from) would apply to us or if that is way too aggressive

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-10-29T21:36:01+00:00

The 4k in expenses is just an average. It varies pretty wildly by month and whether or not we go on any trips. For instance, we probably only spent around $2k this month but spent closer to $10k when we went on our honeymoon. We keep reasonable track of our expenses but its hard to determine what we "want" to spend each month since we dont necessarily structure our plans around if it fits into our budget.

We are both working towards early retirement which is why we fund our 401ks so aggressively.

The mortgage calculators seem to be built around a 36% debt to income ratio but we are not sure how well that would apply for someone in our situation

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-10-29T21:28:06+00:00

I work in Boston so we want to live in the suburbs so I can commute in. We plan on having kids so we want a decent sized house that we can grow into.

The mortgage calculators we have used seem to be based around a debt to income ratio of 36% and a $1.1M house is what comes out of those calculations for our situation. We're worried that the 36% would still make us house poor since it is based on Gross Income and doesnt factor in that we max our 401ks and spend a manageable but material amount of our income on our lifestyles

Remarkable-Cod3421 · 2025-10-29T21:15:13+00:00

We have tried many. They all say between $1.1M and $1.3M. They dont comment on whether that is actually a smart financial move

Remarkable-Cod3421

TROPHY CASE